Resumen de Bumpy flying.
This article discusses the scalloped flippers of whales and how their design could be used to change the way wings are created. Frank E. Fish noticed a small statue of a humpback whale in a Boston sculpture gallery. On closer examination, he saw that the creature's large, winglike pectoral flippers were studded with evenly spaced bumps along their leading edges. Fish was taken by surprise. As a specialist in the hydrodynamics of vertebrate swimming, he knew of no cetacean flippers, fish fins or avian wings that bore such odd features--all of those have smooth front edges. After intermittent study over the next two decades--involving in one instance the sawing off of three-meter-long flippers from a rotting, beached humpback--the biology professor at Pennsylvania's West Chester University and several colleagues have recently shown that the whale's knobby side appendages in some ways trump the more conventional sleek designs of both human and nature. Working with fluid dynamics engineer Laurens E. Howle of Duke University and David S. Miklosovic and Mark M. Murray of the U.S. Naval Academy, Fish fabricated two 56-centimeter-long plastic facsimiles of humpback pectoral flippers--one with the characteristic lumps, one without. The key reason for the improved performance are the pairs of counterrotating swirls created at either side of the leading-edge bumps, called tubercles.
